Time & Perspective Quote by James Cameron

Evening arrives here like a perfectly framed tracking shot: the sun poised "on the rim of the world", the sound dropping out, the city turning into motion. Cameron writes like a director even when he is just reminiscing, building the scene from light to silence to crowd choreography. The seduction is immediate: India as atmosphere, not argument, a place that can be captured in one suspended, cinematic beat.

Then he spikes the postcard. Those "ten thousand civil servants" on "a river of bicycles" are funny because they are so specific and so unromantic. Not rickshaws, not holy men, not spice markets: bureaucracy on wheels. The line refuses the usual Western travelogue move of treating India as pure mysticism; it insists on the middle class as the main character. And it’s a sly political image, too: a vast administrative machine flowing home in unison, the state literally pedaling itself through the dusk.

The last clause is the real tell. "Brooding on the Lord Krishna and the cost of living" compresses two forces that outsiders love to split apart: devotion and daily arithmetic. Cameron’s intent isn’t to mock faith; it’s to puncture the tourist fantasy that spirituality floats above material pressure. The humor comes from juxtaposition, but the respect comes from accuracy. People can carry the divine and the rent in the same head, at the same hour, on the same bicycle. That’s the hush he’s actually describing: not exotic silence, but the shared, fleeting balance between transcendence and logistics.